Think of all the miners in the past who have been trapped and were not rescued. Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out.
ADDED:
"This is our casino," the miner says at one point, showing a table where the miners, he says, had made some makeshift dominoes.It is the best thing to do, under the circumstances. In the above-ground world casinos are deliberately constructed without windows.
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I pray and hope for their speedy recovery and safety.
“Here is where we meet every day, here is where we plan, where we pray,” he says. “Here is the meeting room where all of the decisions are made with the involvement of the 33 that are here.”
It will be a hard journey, but I think these guys have what it takes to survive.
A testament to the human spirit. Good thoughts to these men and to their rescuers.
Me too. Every one of them is a national hero.
Singing their national anthem? What a bunch of jingoistic, simple-minded rubes.
/sarc
In the U.S. the blame game would be well underway already and a new regulatory bill would be bouncing around in committee.
It's great to hear they're ok and in such relatively good spirits. I also read somewhere yesterday that it may only be a matter of weeks before they're able to get them out.
These look like tough me. I think they have what it takes. My thoughts and prayers are with them.
I remember a mining accident in the US where so many died and one man left a note, "tell my family I will see them on the other side."
The pictures of them are truly haunting. Like something out of "The Inferno" or a view from the River Styx into Hades.
I also agree with PatCA and dbp. These guys have had it tough all their lives and will make it, assuming the mine holds together. I don't doubt they pray a lot.
These miners are like the middle class Americans trapped in a caved in economy. But instead of a rescue, we have a Marxist earth moving administration using the EPA and bailouts of the elite to forever seal us into our trapped condition. We need a rescue.
How much are they paying for rent? Does it include utilities?
I heard on the radio this morning that NASA is offering their psychological expertise from years of manned space flight- all they know about helping humans in very close quarters stay sane.
That struck me as an excellent idea. I'd take them up on it.
"Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out."
Imagine. You can almost hear John Lennon singing away, and visualize the CPark memento to him. But reality is weirder than anything you might imagine. An old observation - the idea that the "death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic" -- captures it well. Emotion and moral feelings pull in one direction; utilitarian rationality (the 'do you know how many more lives we could save if we redirected the recourses to X' idea) in another. It's encouraging that, in instances like this, emotion and moral feelings carry the day.
It's sn antidote, I suppose, to the posts about Avastin and ObamaCare of a few days ago.
Althouse,
The Blog cpation is overdone. In the second article the NYT's says:
Then on Wednesday, the health minister announced that officials had informed the miners that they would not be rescued before Chile’s Independence Day on Sept. 18 and that “we hoped to get them out before Christmas.”
so that actually haven't been told on purpose that it will take 3 months.
What they have been told is, it may be 3 weeks more, but could stretch 3 months.
Every one of them is a hero.
What have they done that is heroic? Surviving a catastrophe is not heroic. Showing respect does not require inflation.
One possible saving grace: Experience has shown that people isolated for an extended amount of time, cut off from daylight and other visual references, tend to lose track of the time. I recall a young woman buried in the collapse of a South Korean department store; she was rescued after 17 days, and apparently thought that she had spent only a fraction of that time in the rubble.
I remembered this from 11th grade poetry class:
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
by Richard Brautigan
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.
There were survivors in the wreckage at Pearl Harbor that people could hear tapping for quite a while after the attack.
They did not rescue them (or attempt to, IIRC.) That was then. This is now.
That is haunting.
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